One of the biggest developments from Attorney General Eric Holder’s grilling yesterday is that he apparently only orally recused himself from the controversial case involving the AP phone records. While Holder claims he believes he recused himself around June, during examination he admitted he never did so in writing with an explanation for his action. He doesn’t even remember the exact day.

William DeBuys’ A Great Aridness is a love song and keening lament for the American Southwest in our era of man-made climate change. He manages to capture the romantic allure and the scientific observations of the desert, transcending both perspectives in a fiercely living narrative. His search for wisdom takes him from reservations to mountaintops, from university halls to boom-and-bust exurbs.

Somewhere over my computer screen is a modest group of thoughtful, worried, anxious and maybe hopeful folk who happened upon these words by choice or accident. Writers, communicating from a distance, have a moral responsibility to imagine their readers as individual embodied beings with their own histories, victories, challenges and tragedies.

A good writer’s motto: There are stories in readers’ eyes that are more poignant than your own.